Great products that modern technology has made redundant

Yeah, cassette tapes, TDK C90s (CrO2 if you were feeling flush) with painstakingly sequenced compilations and hand-written track listings.

@binners, there is a small army of people who still use b+w enlargers, film and paper, much of it made by Ilford. Unlike slide projectors, and this stuff.

Cowgum! A friend of mine, now retired, used Cibachrome prints from slides, Letraset and Cowgum to create proofs for book covers and magazine artwork.

My dad had a Gestetner and a hefty long-carriage typewriter. When the Amstrad PCW arrived (1986?) he didn’t need the red correction fluid.

Wouldn’t microfiche readers be needed for existing newspaper and museum archives?

Vinyl’s not dead: http://www.whathifi.com/news/vinyl-sales-increase-55-in-2011

Fax machine is still used at my work, mainly for net-phobic farmers who leave all paperwork to the last minute (especially paying invoices).

Common sense. Product of evolution, now almost unheard of.

Ratchet screwdrivers – the ones about a foot long that you push and they do the screw up or down. Not seen one since cordless screwdrivers came out.

Also, cars that need servicing every 1000 miles, door hinges oiling every week, tyre pressures checking, head under the bonnet every other day, tweaking the choke to get it going on a cold day, etc etc.

Yankee screwdrivers! I know of a few still in use.

childrens Imagination.

The fax machine is also still in use in banking – the entire Libor loan market is still fax based.

I still use an automatic watch, I doubt I’ll ever go to quartz. I also listen to vinyl and hope to inherit my parents’ collection imminently as they’ve disposed of their turntable.

mircofiche is still used in archives

we’ve got two rooms at uni with drawing boards and desks – the architects and construction students have to learn how to draw by hand before they use software

Definitely audio cassette. Doing a compilation and giving one to a young lady was the easiest way of letting her know you were interested.

Definitely audio cassette. Doing a compilation and giving one to a young lady was the easiest way of letting her know you were interested.

Bic biro, for hand-rewinding said cassettes.

Years ago at work we had a sort of microfiche thing, but the thing with the images on was in a cassette that was loaded like a film. There was a huge stack of these films (100-200) and a book.
If you needed a buy something, say a flange washer, you’d look in the book for flange washers, where you’d be told which film to load. On the film was all the catalogs from everyone who made flange washers.
It had a self loading mechanism that grabbed the end and fed it in, then you had a fast forward control to get to the frame you wanted.
Every few weeks the supply would come around with new indexes and films.
Just can’t remember what it was called.
Totally replaced by google.

Got to agree with Zokes earlier in regards to Vinyl. I have finally had to make the switch from Vinyl records to using mp3’s for DJ’ing. Luckily i still have the control using a vinyl, but they are timecode ones and involves the laptop being connected to my turntables.

Still sounds good tho 🙂

Nothing on a computer makes a satisfying “clunk” anymore. These mincey usb connectors and disk drives have removed all the fun out of loading data.

The muzzle loading cannon

The Overhead Projector

Ah, microfiche. I remember when I was a trainee and companies house was next door to the office. We’d order the fiche and I’d go round, pick it up and print what I wanted off it.

Speaking to current trainees about how easy they have it with electronic searches made me feel old enough but the follow up question “what’s a microfiche” made it so much worse.

I really miss filling one of these with a playlist for the car

Razzle, Escort, Men only….

Not a product as such, but the library has more or less ceased to exist as a physical entity for me. I’ve been maybe 3 times in the last 5 years, my job 15 years ago would have meant being there every day.

Of course the library still exists, and has been dramatically augmented by digitisation – I use the online library each day. But physically going to a building called the library and sitting down to read something has completely disappeared as an activity for me. Loads of the smaller libraries in universities have now shut, with resources all being centralised in 1 or 2 megalibraries.

Oh dear Lord, so much stuff here that was part of my working life.
Cow Gum for a while, but superceded by a stripe waxer, much easier to re-position text when pasting up.
That Agfa camera, I used to use one for making PMT’s and line film and half-tones, which I then had to plan and strip up with red litho tape.
Rotring pencils with a .3 4H lead and a .5 blue for doing the artwork layout, because blue didn’t camera.
Rotring and Mecanorma pens, Letraset, CS10 line board. Spray mount and Photo mount.
Punch tape for our first A-M photosetter. Cans of lighter fuel for cleaning artwork of wax before going under the camera.
I still have a linen tester that’s around twenty-five years old, and I still use it, because I still hand-plan film for making plates, we just print raffle and lottery tickets in multi-million quantities, so plates just go on the machine until they wear out, at around 150,000 impressions.
TDK MA-XG metal tapes, for only the very best compilations, usually from 12″ singles.
Minidisc: still got loads, keep meaning to put my Sony deck back into the system.
(Turns away, wiping tears from eyes).

What’s this about people not using bread knives? I use one every day!

MiniMaglites. The single AAA cell version. Yes LEDs are brighter but show me your working LED torch in 25 years.

Oh, and hankering after my Rapidographs after reading this. Engineers use them too, not just graphic designers.

I thought that LEDs would outlast traditional incandescant bulbs.

Zippo lighters, a 1930s design that has stood the test of time.

What’s this about people not using bread knives? I use one every day!

Some people may be confusing ‘redundant’ with ‘used less commonly’ …

Was going to say mini disc, i stil have one somewhere and a few discs.

For me the biggest thing forced to retire would be Concorde, amazing plane, but the internet is quicker. 🙁

and

And many hours under the bonnet..

I used to use one of these all day every day:

That waterboardings got a lot to answer for.